Aug. 25, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:52
3803 The Truth About Equality: Outcome vs. Opportunity
One of the most important discussions taking place in the world today relates to human inequality. While many people view outcome inequality as a problem in need of solving, others strive to increase the equality of opportunity instead. Stefan Molyneux breaks down the struggle between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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So, we're going to start with the great dividing line in the world.
Between left and right.
Between conservatives and liberals.
Between capitalists and socialists.
Between small government and big government people.
And it is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
So think of a poker game, for instance.
So in a poker game, there are the rules of poker.
And everyone understands the rules, who's generally playing, particularly at a halfway decent level.
They understand the rules.
And so everyone has the same opportunity to win.
However, we all know that like most anything that involves biology or intelligence or talent or ambition and so on, there's kind of like a bell curve, right?
A bell curve. There's a lot of average poker players.
There are a few really bad poker players.
And there are a few really excellent poker players.
So equality of opportunity is anyone gets to sit down and play poker.
And the rules are the same for everyone.
Now, equality of outcome, though, is very different.
Equality of outcome says that what should happen is that everyone should end up with the same winnings from poker.
Everyone should end up with the same winnings from poker.
Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
Think of the game Monopoly. You start off with your $1,500.
It's still more real than fiat currency.
You start off with your $1,500.
And you go around the square and you buy and you sell and you hotel and you get rent and so on.
It's always the railroads.
Hang on to the railroads.
They are the mosquitoes that take the elephants of your opponents down.
But when you play Monopoly, everyone starts out with the same stuff.
There's some randomness in the roll of the dice and there's some skill in the negotiation and the purchases or deferral of gratification if you don't purchase stuff later.
And so what happens is that money tends to accumulate to a person and you end up with usually a winner and so on, right?
Unless you have the infinite central banking situation, in which case you just have to eventually call an airstrike in on the ottoman.
So, with monopoly, there's equality of opportunity.
Start up with the same amount of money, all have the same rules, but you're going to end up with very different outcomes.
A running race, right? You all start at the same place, right?
Assuming you're not on one of these weird Mobius strip tracks where everyone has to start at different spaces because the outside is longer.
You start at the same place.
Everyone has the equality of opportunity, but of course not everyone is going to cross the finish line at the same time.
Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
Now, if you want to understand what the term social justice means...
So the original term, justice, didn't need the social on it.
Justice, you know, is equality of opportunity.
Justice is everyone's subject to the same laws.
No one is above the law.
So you can go out and start a business.
You can go and work for someone else.
Everyone has the same opportunity.
But the outcomes are going to be very different.
So, justice is equality of opportunity.
Same laws for everyone.
Social justice Is equality of outcome that everyone ends up roughly the same?
Or if there is a bell curve, it's kind of squished towards the middle.
It's less of a hill and more of a pillar, right?
You can squish everyone around the middle.
And this is the idea, you know, you take money from the rich and you give the money to the poor and so on.
And so this difference, equality of outcome, Of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
That is the difference.
Now, the small government folks are happy with equality of opportunity.
Now, they say, you know, property rights and a free market and so on, and let the best man or woman win.
Just everything's open to be bidded on.
You can go start a business. Anyone can go start a business.
And whoever wins, wins.
That is unbearable to the social justice people, because that tends to produce a disparity of outcomes.
There are some rich, a lot of middle class, and some poor.
It's the bell curve, right? It's the bell curve, right?
Remember the middle class that used to exist in America and now doesn't...
Really exist as much anymore.
It's really being crushed. More people sliding off onto the left of the bell curve, into the poor, and more people being vaulted up or climbing up to the very rich, for a variety of reasons we've talked about in other shows.
Nothing to do with the free market, which has been shrinking for many decades.
So, when you look at society and you hear the term social justice, what you're hearing is, we want equality of outcome.
We want the equality of outcome.
We don't care about equality of opportunity because you can't have both.
If you have equality of outcome, you can't have equality of opportunity.
Equality of opportunity, for instance, is property rights and the free market.
Equality of outcome means a violation of property rights and the free market.
So if you want everyone to kind of get squished around the middle of the bell curve, if you want everyone to kind of be lower to upper middle class, then you have to take money from the rich and give it to the poor.
You have to violate the property rights of the rich in order to take money by force through the state and hand it over to the poor.
At least that would never corrupt the political process by ending up with...
Weasel-faced politicians promising free stuff to the poor in return for votes, because that would be a kind of third-world corruption that even a republic could not withstand for long.
So if you want equality of opportunity, that's one thing.
If you want equality of outcome, it's at war with equality of opportunity.
Think of... I wrote this essay decades ago called Marxism.
M-A-R-C-K-S-I-S-M. Right?
Marxism. So... If you go to a university and there's a test coming up, well, everyone has the equality of opportunity.
Everyone has access to the library.
You can go and see the professor.
You have the books. You can study or not study as you see fit.
Everyone has equality of opportunity.
But, you see, if you want equality of outcome, in other words, if you want everyone's grades to be between, say, 65% and 75%, If you want everyone's grades, I could be B minus or whatever it's going to be.
Then what happens is people have to go and study.
Or they get to go and study if they want or not.
And then what happens is you take the marks from the students who score very well and you give it to the students who score poorly.
You are redistributing the marks that come from the results of the test.
Now, when you do that, you change the entire equation of studying, of all of this kind of stuff.
Because the whole point is that the social justice warriors, right, the leftists, they want everyone to kind of end up in the lower to upper middle class.
A lot of them will accept some disparity of income, but not too much.
You know, like the super rich, the 1%, like not too much.
Okay, so maybe people can go from between $25,000 to maybe $200,000, but nothing else.
Squish that down. But if you think about it in terms of marks, in terms of studying for a test, if you have a quality of opportunity, then it's on you how well or badly you do on the test, right?
I mean, if you get 100%, you worked hard, you studied, or whatever, maybe just brilliant photographic memory, whatever it is, right?
You get that quality.
If you get 40%, then you do really badly.
So there's a bell curve, and what happens is people say, we want to squish things into the middle of the bell curve.
But it doesn't work out that way.
It doesn't work out that way.
What happens is when you start taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, you end up with more poor, so there's more people on the left-hand side.
And poverty was being solved in the post-Second World War period.
The poverty rate was declining.
After the Second World War until the 1960s, by one percentage point every year, we were within like half a generation of eliminating all but chosen poverty.
You know, the guy says, I'm going to go live in a garret and work on a novel and work as a waiter and I'm going to just, or I'm going to be a monk or whatever it is, right?
Or I just don't want to work.
I just want to travel, you know, Trudeau style.
We were within like half a generation of completely eliminating poverty.
The free market was. And then the government, oh, we're going to go help.
We're going to push this process along.
So you started taking money from the rich and giving money to the poor.
And so what happened was you ended up with more poor And you ended up with more rich.
Because the rich, once they started being pillaged significantly through the state, they went and started to co-op the state to get politicians to end up with favorable tax systems and so on and all this kind of deductions and so on and offshoring and you name it, right?
So the middle class gets hollowed out.
Because if you take marks from the people who do well On an exam and you give it to those who are doing poorly, what happens?
Well, the people who are doing poorly study less, right?
So their marks go down. Their marks go down.
And interestingly enough, in this situation, the people who are doing really, really well, they study less as well.
I mean, what's the point of getting 100 if you're going to end up with a 70 anyway?
Because 30% of your marks are going to be taken and handed out to people who did badly.
So fewer people study overall.
So you start off Let's just say you have 10,000 marks to distribute in a big class and then you put in this redistribution.
You take marks from the smartest or the best scoring kids.
You give it to the lowest scoring kids.
You end up with marks of like 5,000 to distribute and everything just goes down in terms of quality.
Now, there's something interesting as well.
That's one thing, you know, just scooping up the marks and redistributing it.
And you end up with something very different than what you started.
This is the fundamental mistake that the leftists make all the time.
If they look at society and they say, well, we have X amount of dollars and there's this amount of people who are rich and this amount of people who are poor.
So we scoop from here and we give to there.
But the moment you touch it, it changes.
It's literally like trying to, like you're looking in a lake, right?
Looking in a lake, narcissist style.
You're looking in a lake and you say, oh, you know, my cheeks could lose a little bit more red.
You get a paintbrush, you start painting the lake.
Well, you've just destroyed the reflection, right?
The moment you touch society and you attempt to redistribute stuff by force, even charity.
Charity is more complicated, though, and at least it's voluntary.
Particularly with force, when you start redistributing income, you change everything in society.
Incentives change. Motivations change, and particularly energy to achieve diminishes enormously.
Why work hard for stuff you're going to get for free?
That would be crazy.
So, equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
Now, it's also important to remember that if you want a quality of outcome, that is fundamentally tyrannical.
I don't know if you've ever had people in your life.
I haven't for many years, but there were a few.
If you've ever had people in your life, they micromanage everything that you do.
They want to control everything that you do.
I knew a woman years ago.
It's over at her house. She wanted to make some toast.
And her mom was like hovering over her.
You've got to empty out the crumb tray.
You've got to make sure it's plugged in.
Don't brush this. Put the side.
Make sure it's on the right setting.
Just control, control, control.
Micromanagement. It's very claustrophobic.
It's like, I did this when I was a kid, you get a face cloth, you put it on your face and you try and see if you can breathe through it.
You can, a little bit, but very slowly.
And you end up half drinking as well.
That to me is the kind of claustrophobic feeling of the micromanagers.
But if you want a quality of outcome, you've got to micromanage what everyone does all the time.
Like, forget about the money in poker.
If you just want the victories in poker to be evenly distributed among, say, five poker players, you've got to see all of their cards.
You've got to, like, just for yourself, imagine you could sort of set up cameras, and you'd have to say, okay, you've got to give this card to this person.
Now you've got to give this card to this person.
Now you have to not fold, and you have to bluff, but, like, you'd have to control everything that everyone is doing.
In order to get equality of outcome, if you want everyone to not just start with the same money in Monopoly, but to end up with the same money in Monopoly, you've got to micromanage what everyone does.
Oh, you have to sell this house now.
You can't upgrade those four houses to a hotel.
You can't buy that railroad because it's going to...
And first of all, you won't ever know exactly how to end up with everyone who has the same amount of money and maybe the same number of properties, I don't know, at the end of Monopoly.
You won't ever know. You'll just be micromanaging everything.
Nobody can just play. Because you need a dictator, like an obsessive-compulsive, hyper-claustrophobic, controlling dictator to assure equality of outcome.
I mean, just think of a running race. If there's a running race, equality of opportunity is everyone starts at the same spot, and boom, off they go.
Now, equality of opportunity would have something to do perhaps with, you know, gender and age, and like, you know, they have in boxing, like featherweight, bantamweight, and heavyweight, and so on.
So there may be some making sure things are fair, but after that, you know, bob's your uncle off, you go away to the races.
Fill your boots, as a friend of mine used to say.
So if you, in a running race, if you want everyone to end At the same place, you have a huge problem.
So you may put the slower runners further ahead.
Right? So somebody who's half the speed, you might put them twice up.
If it's a thousand-yard race, you might put them 500 yards up.
Meters! Sorry. Meters.
Old-school imperial.
So... Now, imagine if you want everyone to end up at the same spot, where you've got to run next to them.
Slow down! Speed up!
Everybody! Control! Less running!
Oh, we have to go back and start again.
This guy got too far ahead, so I'm going to move him back a little bit.
But you'd have to control everything that everyone was doing during the entire race to end up with the quality of outcome.
And this is true whether you wanted everyone to go across the end line at exactly the same time, or if you're like, okay, there can be a 10% variance, whatever, right?
And everything you touch will change.
It's a maddening, incessant, unresolvable, ever-escalating situation.
Because if you want all the runners in a 1,000-meter race to end up within 5% of each other's time...
Okay, so let's say the slow guy, you move him ahead.
Well, you know he's half as fast because when he ran the 1,000 meters...
Then you move, like he was half as fast, so you move him up 500 meters, right?
However, maybe he's really fast at the first 500 meters and just slows down in the last 500 meters, in which case he's way too far ahead now, so you've got to move him back.
Then you move him further back and you move someone else up who's a little slower.
You move someone else back who's faster.
But maybe the person you move back is one of these people who's really hyper-competitive.
And the harder it is for them to win, the more they're going to push themselves.
So you move him further back, he gets even faster.
You see? You'll never, ever, ever be able to have everyone finish at the same time.
If you move someone who's slow further ahead...
If someone has three quarters of speed, you move them up 750 meters, right?
It's only 250 meters in the end.
So they're not going to run as fast because they feel they're closer, you know, that tortoise and the hare situation, right?
They're not going to run as fast. Whereas the guy you've moved further back is now running like crazy.
He's like an Usain Bolt blur of greased lightning.
So you constantly have to adjust everything to try and get everyone to finish at the same time or close to the same time.
But every time you adjust something, the variables all change.
You can't ever, ever do it.
But what you can do is you can continually control more and more and more and more of what people do.
Maybe the diet. You know, the guy who has a, you know, the rock style face full of carb boosting pasta right before the race.
Maybe he's basically running with a kettle drum attached to his belly.
So you say, oh, you can't eat that.
And the guy who, I don't know, has, you know, egg whites and peanut butter.
I don't know. What do you need for running?
It's been years since I've done it.
But maybe you say to that person, I'm sorry, you can't.
Oh, maybe the guy's got really good shoes. Oh, you can't have those really good shoes.
You understand that maybe the guy who trains more, you say, I'm sorry, you can't train that much because it's really throwing things off.
And the guy who doesn't train as much, sorry, you've got to step it up.
You understand, you control their footwear, their food, their training schedules, where they start in the race, and you'll never, ever solve the problem because every time you change the variables, the variables then change as well.
Move people up, they run slower.
Move people back, they'll run faster.
You'll never be able to do it.
And you understand, this is why communism and fascism, this is why they don't work.
It's why central planning doesn't work.
You cannot add a little bit of red to your reflection in a lake.
It just changes everything.
You touch it, it breaks.
Equality of opportunity, easy.
Easy. Okay. Here's the start of the race.
Really complicated. Here's the start of the race.
There's the end of the race.
Go. That's it. Start of the race, end of the race, go.
You're done. You're done.
But if you want everyone to end at the same time or close to the same time, you understand this is exhausting.
And you'll never, ever be able to achieve it, but you will continually try and control more and more of what people do in order to create this equality of outcomes.
And you'll never ever be able to achieve it.
The only thing that will grow is not equality of outcome, but your power over other people, which is why those who want, who thirst, who drink, who wish to drink deep of the marrow blood of satanic power over others, those people always wish to push equality of outcome.
They wish to push equality of outcome because they know they'll never gain equality of outcome.
In fact, it'll end up being worse.
The outcome will end up being worse.
Instead of it being the bell curve, it'll end up with, like, the two-hump camel, right?
One hump of poor, one hump of rich, and an eviscerated middle class.
They don't promote equality of outcome because they want equality of outcome because it doesn't take any thought to realize it's never going to work.
I mean, if you want equality of outcome, let's say you like that in society, you want equality of outcome, well, that's a pretty big deal, would you say, in society, to sort of change from equality of opportunity, which is the rule of law, to equality of outcome is a huge change.
So you'd think you might want to test this a little bit.
It's not that hard. You know, set up a poker game or a game of hearts or sevens or whatever, set up a game, Monopoly, and try and make sure everyone ends up with similar amounts of money, all the same.
Try all of that. See if you can do it.
If you can't do it in a Monopoly game with your immediate family, you sure as hell can't do it in society as a whole, right?
So this idea, let's get a quality of outcome, it's so easily testable.
I mean, you can test it in an afternoon with a deck of cards.
It's not complicated. So people don't promote it because they think it's possible.
It's so easy to prove that it's not possible.
Kids could do it, right? And the reason it's promoted is because it allows for the accumulation of power by the state in society, by promising this mirage of equality of outcome, they then get to control more and more and more of your life.
And there's never any end to it, unless you throttle back, pull back on state control of people's lives.
If you can pull back on that, then you can allow equality of opportunity to displace equality of outcome.
Or there's a crash. You know, I mean, if you have this race, right?
A running race. And you start micromanaging everything that everyone does.
You start here, you can't wear these shoes, you have to eat this, you have to run this fast, run faster, run slower.
Eventually people are going to say, to hell with this.
I'm not. I'm not sticking around.
Right? That's the going gold stuff, right?
That's when people sort of check out of society.
They just don't want to play with you anymore.
You know, we all had this when we were kids, right?
You know, everyone comes up with their own games when you're kids.
And, you know, I had friends, and I'm sure I did this myself sometimes, too.
You come up with some game, you think it's going to be really great.
It's too complicated. Nobody can figure it out.
And people are just like, I don't know, let's just go back to playing tech.
Free tech! And so, when things get overcomplicated, people stop wanting to play.
The whole point is just to give people an excuse to control more and more of what you do by holding up this mirage.
Let's do the Bataan Death March over the desert because there's a wonderful oasis out there where we can all drink and play and swim.
It's a mirage. You just keep marching people.
You talk about the oasis because you want to get people to stand under a whip in a straight line in the hot sun, not because you think there's a mirage, an actual oasis you can actually get to.
So why does this equality...
Of outcome, micromanaging, ever-escalating, socialist, fascist, communist impulse so continually take root in society.
Well, I wish there were a nicer word, and I'm just going to have to be blunt, because of losers.
Because of losers.
You know... If you're certain or reasonably certain you can win the race, you don't want equality of outcome, right?
You only want equality of outcome when the stakes are high and your ability is low.
Right, so let's say there's a $50,000 prize for whoever wins this race.
Well, if you're pretty much the fastest guy around, you want equality of opportunity because that's going to get you the $50,000.
If you're broke and desperately need the money, you're going to want equality of outcome.
So maybe it's shared among the top five runners, or maybe it's shared among everyone proportional to their time, then you want everything to be evened out, right?
Everybody gets a participation trophy, you know, like Democrats in the last half decades worth of elections.
So if you're a loser, if the stakes are high and your ability is low, or your motivation is low, or your self-confidence is low, I mean, it can be a number of things that are both objective and subjective that might result.
In you not winning the prize.
You know, maybe you're just not fast, right?
You're not from Kenya. Maybe you're just not fast.
Or maybe you just, what's the point?
You know, I'm never going to win.
And so you don't bother training and you eat too much or whatever it is, right?
It could be any number of things. Or maybe you're like, well, I'd rather buy a video game than a good pair of sneakers.
So there could be any number of reasons.
But if the stakes are high but your ability is low, or your belief that your ability is low, then you want equality of outcome.
And people will dangle that in front of you and say, I'm going to make sure you don't lose the race.
I'm going to make sure that everyone gets a participation trophy.
So the losers want the equality of outcome.
And it is funny, you know, because...
You know, I was playing tennis with a friend recently, and he had a killer shot.
Like, jaw-droppingly, I barely saw it, and even if I were half my age, I'd never be able to reach it in time.
It was a blisteringly great shot.
I actually just started laughing.
It was like, that was, and I said, man, that was a thing of beauty.
That was a great, great shot.
I mean, why not? Enjoy it, right?
Enjoy it. Now, to have the ego strength to enjoy being defeated, to enjoy losing, or not enjoy it like you love it and it's a great thing or whatever, but it takes a certain amount of intelligence or an understanding of how the world works.
In the free market, this is the funny thing, right?
In the free market, if you lose, you win.
If you lose, you win.
Like, if, you know, I don't know, like European countries or...
European-derived countries invented something like air conditioning, right?
And so the whole world benefits from air conditioning.
I mean, hot places, obviously, in particular.
The whole world benefits from air conditioning.
So keeping resources in European and European-derived countries allows for things like penicillin, air conditioning, soap, you know, other kinds of things to be developed, which benefit the whole world.
So you have to have the ego strength to know, even if you're not the most successful society in the world, the fact that a successful society or a highly innovative or creative or industrial society has a lot of resources benefits you in the long run.
But that takes, again, a certain amount of intelligence to be able to defer the gratification of immediate resentment and disappointment and understand that if you lose, you win.
I mean, let's say that you love music and you're in a battle of the bands contest.
You love music. You were inspired by great bands that you listen to and so on.
And let's say that you lose the battle of the bands contest.
Well, of course, that's disappointing and frustrating, and maybe it'll spur you to work harder at your instrument or write better songs or whatever it is, or more popular songs, I'd say.
So you lose the battle of the band.
Now, if you're smart, or maybe you don't even have to be that smart, maybe somebody just has to basically explain it to you, the fact that you're not that popular and you lost is really important because you love music.
And if mediocre bands were promoted instead of the best bands, there'd be no music industry, right?
You can sell tickets to the three tenors.
You can't sell tickets to karaoke.
Really, right? I guess it's less than American Idol.
I don't know. They'd probably let people in for free.
So the fact that you lose is important feedback.
It may prevent you from wasting your life on something you're not that great at, or it may spur you to greater ambition.
So if you, let's say, you were never going to be a successful musician, the fact that you lose early and nobody comes to see your acts or whatever, that's important.
That's really good information.
It prevents you from wasting your life doing something or trying to do something that you're going to fail at and not, you know, going to cost you the ability to...
Have any savings, have a family, a stable life.
It's going to be very frustrating. Or, you know, it'll spur you to work harder.
You know, maybe you're more in it for the drugs and groupies to take some cliches.
Well, now you'll buckle down and, you know, be a little post-clean-up Tyler rather than toxic twins Tyler.
And so you'll work harder and then you'll get better.
But if you can't get any better, you shouldn't win.
Because if mediocre bands won, there'd be no music industry, which is what inspired you in the first place.
And If you did somehow win because of this equality of outcome thing, what would happen is the music industry would be destroyed.
There'd be no career for you anyway, but there wouldn't even be any other great music for you to listen to because it would be...
I think people can understand this even if they can't necessarily come up with it themselves.
They can understand this kind of outcome.
But to recognize the value...
Of losing. There's the personal, you know, I wish I had one or whatever, but that just shows that you care about something.
But to recognize the value of losing and how much better it is for society as a whole, if you're not that great at something that you should lose, that resources should flow to other people.
Well, there are a lot of people in society who tell you that the reason that you've lost is not because of any personal failing or any Inability.
It's because of racism or sexism or phobias or some sort of bigotry in society.
And they sow this resentment against success and that traps people into failure.
I mean, I have no proof for this.
It's just a thought. Let me know what you think in the comments, of course.
It might actually be a younger sibling thing.
It might, to some degree, be this sort of resentment of success.
You know, I always hung out with kids who were older than me, so I was generally the smallest and the slowest and so on.
And when I went to boarding school, I was the youngest kid, if I remember rightly, in the whole school.
And it's kind of frustrating.
It's kind of frustrating. You know, the way that younger siblings gotta enforce those rules, gotta enforce those rules and make sure you get the fair stuff in your family.
I knew a guy, his brother was supposed to go to bed five minutes after him.
Five minutes after him.
So he'd sit there in his bed and he'd go, one, two, three, all the way up to 300.
And then he'd say, it's time for bed!
Gotta have the rules, gotta be fair.
And... There's a way to sell this equality of outcome.
And it appeals to people's insecurities.
Like, I'm never going to win, so I need some help or whatever.
And the one thing that, like, where the argument goes for the left, which I have some sympathy for, is something like this.
Okay, well, you say, let's take Monopoly.
Take the running race.
Not everyone does start out the same way.
Not everyone does start out the same way.
Some people are born into families where the parents are athletic, they have money for good running shoes, they have money for coaches, they have money for training, they have the time, effort and energy and availability.
They have a safe neighborhood to run in.
Worried about stray bullets or something.
Or in Monopoly. So everyone starts out with the same money and I could hear the collective ripple of my leftist friends out there when I talk about everyone starts out with $1,500.
They're like, no they don't! They don't start out with $1,500.
Everybody starts out differently.
Some people have rich parents, some people have poor parents, some people have single moms, some people have two stable happy households and so on, right?
That's all true. Of course.
Absolutely. That's true.
Two points about that, though.
Two points about that. First of all, it's IQ. IQ is what determines where you're going to end up.
It's not socioeconomic status in particular.
Schooling. Doesn't matter. Private, public, good schools, bad schools in general.
You end up where your IQ tells you're going to end up and IQ is, you know, 50 to 80 percent, depending on where you measure someone in their life, 50 to 80 percent genetic.
So there's just genes.
You know, like I was making a joke earlier, a comment about people from a certain section of Kenya are ridiculously fast runners.
They feel like ridiculously fast twitch muscles in their legs and just crazy lung efficiency when it comes to processing oxygen and stuff.
They're just fast. And there was one guy in a book I read.
John Entian actually interviewed him on the show.
And he's talking about, oh, there was some guy who was kind of fat and sat on the couch.
But he was from this particular area in Kenya.
And he's like, you know what? I'm just going to...
I'm just going to go become a runner.
And within three months, he was just blowing past everyone.
There's a lot of genetics involved in that.
It's like singing. You can take singing lessons, and that's going to have some effect on how good your voice sounds.
But people who don't take any singing lessons, like Freddie Mercury, sound fantastic.
People who take a lot of singing lessons don't.
And so there's some, you know, you can adjust a little bit, but basically it's just whatever voice you're born with, that's kind of the voice that you...
You have. You say, ah, well people who take a lot of singing lessons, they end up with really good voices.
No, no, no. The people who have really good voices profit more from singing lessons than people who don't have good voices.
So if you've already got a really good voice, a singing lesson makes it professional.
So yes, people who are professional singers have taken a lot of singing lessons, but they took singing lessons because they had great voices to begin with.
They didn't end up with great voices because of the singing lessons.
So, I understand. So, there's different beginnings.
But, first of all, people who are born under hardship, you know, that which does not kill you makes you stronger.
Right? Heat plus pressure turns a cold into a diamond.
There's no reason to believe fundamentally that a harsh upbringing or a difficult upbringing produces someone who can't succeed in life.
Quite the opposite in sometimes.
Sometimes the harsh upbringing...
It has a lot to do with making you stronger and meaner, not mean or vicious, but meaner like more ambitious and willing to win sometimes at other people's expense and hungry.
You know, you're hungry. It's the hungriest hunter who's willing to invest the most time in hunting.
So somebody who starts further back has more incentive to run faster.
So it's not guaranteed, oh, well, you start further back and therefore you can't succeed.
Also, I mean, we all know, I mean, the people who end up with lottery winnings, their lives are a complete disaster.
One guy I was reading about recently, won the lottery, ended up with a cocaine addiction, lost his money, ended up in jail.
says you know what i'm way happier in jail than i ever was with millions of dollars out in the in the free world people get divorced and everybody ends up turning to you just for your money and you don't know who your friends are it's a mess some people who win the lottery they don't they just fritter the money away what's that old quote some guy may have made a whole bunch of money and then he lost lost it all and people said you had all this money what happened and he said well i divided the money into two piles
one i spent on you know wine women whiskey song and The other half I just wasted.
This is the thinking, right?
This is a nine-ran point, right?
You can't be bigger than your money. If you didn't earn the money, you generally won't keep the money.
Or the old saying, a fool and his money are soon parted.
So just because you start further back doesn't mean that you can't win the race.
In fact, it may be the greater incentive for you to win the race.
Plus, of course, when you start further back in the world, you start in a poor family or whatever, you know what you see?
You see a lot of crappy lives.
And if that's not a warning to you to do something different with your life, I don't know what is.
You know, it's like if you grow up, you see your dad drinking and passed out and driving dangerously and so on and losing everything.
Well, that's a good example not to drink.
And if you grew up in a broadcast welfare neighborhood like I did, well, then you look at people's lives and you say, I don't know what the purpose of these people's lives is other than to serve as a warning for others to never ever do what they did.
The purpose of their life, to serve as a warning to others.
Don't go this way! And things will be pretty good.
So, you start off poor doesn't mean you can't end up doing well.
That's number one. Number two, which is somewhat of the converse, is that people who grow up with all of these resources...
I mean, you've all heard of the rich prep schools with, you know, like...
STDs are prevalent and drug use is prevalent and, you know, people who grow up sort of soft and cushy and easy in their lives don't often do very well.
And... There is a cycle.
You know, they used to call it shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, right?
So you've got a guy who's shoveling coal and he's a shirt sleeve, right?
And then he has a kid who makes a lot of money and goes up into a three-piece suit and so on.
But his kids blow all the money because they're either not as smart or they grew up too easy or they weren't as hungry and you end up back in shirt sleeves.
Rags to riches to rags in three generations used to be a very, very common thing.
And it happens all over the place. It's why big companies want to always co-opt government to keep them big.
If you go back 100 years, a little bit more than 100 years, like of the Fortune 500 companies around in 1900, like four of them are left.
And there probably would be zero except that they use the government to protect themselves from competition and so on.
And this is true. I mean, I've known this, again, personally as an entrepreneur who came from a very poor background.
My living costs were very low when I was an entrepreneur, which meant I didn't need a lot of salary, which meant that I could underbid other people.
You know, if you're poor, you're hungrier, you have lower overhead, you know, and you're toughened in a way that it's hard to get any other way.
So I'm not recommending poverty and I'm not saying, you know, kids should be traumatized so that they become stronger because that's not Real or true.
But the mere lack of money doesn't necessarily make for a bad childhood.
The mere lack of money doesn't mean that you end up doomed to be poor.
So this idea that it's all unequal at the beginning, which it is naturally, therefore, therefore, as a direct correlation, like dominoes falling, you start off unequal, therefore, it's unequal at the end.
And the inequality at the end is directly traced back to the inequality at the beginning is not true.
There's a constant churn in a free society, particularly like if you look at early 20th century America.
Constant churn. People going from the poor to the rich to the middle class back down.
It's constant churn. Constant churn.
And that is just a reality.
Now, would it be nice to have everyone start off wealthier or...
I don't even know.
Because here's the problem. I forgot to mention number three.
This is the third point. If you say inequality...
of starting place.
It means inequality of outcome and it's unfair.
The only way to solve that, there's two ways to solve that.
One is, personally, you say, okay, well I don't like the fact that I say The sons of single moms, or the daughters of single moms, well, sons really, don't have a same-sex role model.
They don't have a dad. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go become a big brother.
I'm, you know, the agency or the organization.
I'm going to go and spend my time volunteering to be a mentor to sons of single moms, if you're a guy, right?
And you go and you can do that and you say, well, I don't like this.
And it's a good thing to do.
I think it's a wonderful thing to do. So you can go and do that.
Or you can give money to charity.
And you can say, well, the charity, I want you to go and help these people who start off with very little money, give them some more resources, maybe buy a cheap tablet for some kid and some internet access or whatever.
You can do all of that. And I think there's wonderful stuff in doing that.
I mean, most of you don't pay for what I do, so it's kind of charitable in a way towards you.
Now, or what you can do is you can then say, well, we need a big government program to use the power force of the government to take money from these people and give it to those people.
So you say inequality is bad, but then what you've done is you've created an agency within society, like an organization within society called the state, that has the power, pretty much at will, to violate property rights, to raise taxes, to redistribute income, and so on.
Now, the inequality between rich and poor...
In a free society, a small state or no state society, in a free society, the inequality between rich and poor is much less, infinitely less, than the inequality between state and citizen once the state has the power to redistribute income.
If you're at all concerned about inequality, you have to include the state in your definition of what is equality versus inequality.
You see, the rich person cannot legally steal from the poor person, like go and grab their bedding or something like that.
They can't go and steal a table lamp.
It doesn't matter how rich you are in a free society, in an equality of opportunity society, the rich person cannot go and steal from the poor person, and the poor person cannot go and steal from the rich person.
They're both bound by the rule of law, by property rights, and the ban on theft.
So they have material circumstances that are different, but they're bound under the same laws.
The moment you create this big, giant, all-powerful, redistributionist state agency in the midst of society, you've created the greatest inequality because now those within the state can initiate the use of force to take money from so-and-so and give them to so-and-so and regulate this and control that.
I mean, it never ends, as we talked about with the sort of running of the race.
You control everything everyone does.
So if you're concerned about inequality, then creating a group of individuals with the legal right, in fact the legal obligation, to use force, to use violence, right?
Threat of jail for non-payment of taxes or non-compliance with regulations.
You're creating a group of individuals within society who have the legal obligation to transfer trillions of dollars from one group to another.
That is the greatest inequality that can be imagined.
If you're concerned about inequality, that is what you need to be concerned about.
And if you are concerned about inequality, and this is, I know, tough for people to sort of conceptualize, but let me sort of give you a way to make it pretty clear.
If I said to you, we should give the rich the power to take money from everyone else, you'd be appalled.
And I'd say, well, no, we want to do that for reasons of equality.
Or if I were to say, let's arm the poor and give them the right to take whatever property they want from everyone else, you'd say, I hope you would say that's kind of creating this dangerous French Revolution-style mob that's going to be bloodthirsty and barbaric and so on.
Well, sure, because when you create a group and you give them the power or the right or the obligation to use force in pursuit of property redistribution of property rights violations, you've created a vast inequality.
There's inequality of degree.
Some people are shorter, some people are taller, some people are richer, some people are poorer.
And then there's fundamental opposites.
There's fundamental opposites.
Now, the right to use force to redistribute income, which is called theft in a free society, if that becomes the basis for state redistribution of income, it's the greatest inequality that can be imagined.
The rich and the poor both have access to property rights and protection of their property and protection against theft and so on.
But with the state having the power to redistribute income, there's no one else who has anything close to that kind of power.
In fact, what is legal for the state, using force to redistribute income, is legally barred to everyone else.
So if you're concerned about inequality, creating the welfare state is the very worst thing that you can do.
And we've sort of found that out.
So why... Why are people so invested in this, right?
As they call the losers, the people who don't think they can win or who told that they can't win.
And this is another reason why the social justice warriors always talk about racial determinism or class determinism or gender determinism and so on.
Because they wish to create as many helpless people as possible because the more helpless people feel, the more they'll be invested in the equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.
Because if you're confident and certain of your abilities...
You're going to be fine with the quality of opportunity.
Of course. I'll run the race.
I'll give it my best. I'll prepare well.
And we'll see what happens. So why do people end up so invested?
But once you teach people that they're screwed because they're poor, they'll never have a chance, they're rich on everything, there's no opportunities, bloody blood.
Once this has occurred in society, then people make bad decisions.
And really bad decisions.
And so, you know, when I was a kid, there was this whole bunch of propaganda around, you know, men are pigs, there's a patriarchy, marriage is a prison, it's slavery, all the women do is work, and the men just come home and, you know, Ted Bundy style, they slip their hands into the waistband of their pants and demand a beer and a sandwich.
And so if you're a woman and you hear this, that, well, you'd see marriage is just slavery and men are terrible and they're really bad and so on, right?
No. Maybe what happens is there's a nice guy around, but you've been propagandized into thinking that men are bad, so you don't get married to him.
And then he goes up and gets married to someone else and has a great life or whatever.
It's a lot of regret.
It's a lot of regret.
Or let's say that you end up, oh, I can never get ahead.
You know, I was born poor.
I can't ever get ahead.
I'm never going to be able to make anything of myself.
Because the socialists are all telling me that.
The rich own everything. The poor are trapped.
Capitalism is exploitation.
The only way you can become wealthy is if you're willing to grind up the kidneys of others and sell them in plastic bags on eBay.
Only mean people end up rich.
Good people are poor and you can't even get ahead even if you want to.
There's no way out. It's a sedimentary layer of class reality that you can't ever burrow through.
Well, what does that do to your motivation, to your ambition, to your willingness to work hard?
What does it do to your optimism and positivity when it comes to a job interview?
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you tell people enough that they're poor, they can never get ahead, they internalize it, they believe that, and then they can't get ahead.
But not because they're poor, but because they've been told that there's all of this capitalistic, class-based economic determinism That deflates any possibility that they might have, you know?
If I accept that I'm 50 and can't be a ballerina, well, I'm not going to try and become a ballerina.
And if people who are growing up who are poor are told that they have the equal chance to become middle class or rich, as I do at 50 and becoming a ballerina, well, they're not going to bother trying.
In which case, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
You... You put people in cages.
They become prisoners. And then even if you take away the cage, or even if there is no cage, if you say, there's a force field around you, it's going to electrocute you if you walk by them.
If they believe you, you don't need anything there.
It can just be air, but if they believe, they can't.
So maybe a woman or maybe a man never bothered going to become an entrepreneur or he gave up on ideas or he passed things up because he was told he can't get ahead.
Maybe a woman gave up a great guy because she was told that there's all this patriarchal sexism and so on or you know maybe a really smart black or Hispanic kid was told you can't get ahead because Whitey runs everything and you know.
So if you get people to make significant life decisions Based on this propaganda, then there is, they're very invested in this.
They will fight against this, right?
So, if some guy is 40 and he never, he was smart, he could have done something with his life, but he kind of believed in all of this leftist stuff, this economic determinism, you're born poor, you can never change it, unless you're willing to exploit people to be evil.
Well, He's 40, and he's not really done anything with his life.
He's got a low-rent job he hates.
He's resentful. He's never going to get ahead based on where he stands.
And someone comes along and says, you know, you fell for it, man.
You fell for it. You didn't have to end up here.
You could have worked hard.
You could have, you know, three things to get into the middle class.
It's not complicated. Finish high school.
Have a job and keep it for a year.
And don't get pregnant until you're married.
Three things. And you have like a 97% chance of ending up in the middle class.
It's all you had to do. You were told by all of these bastards that you could never escape.
And you believed it, so you can't escape it.
Not because you couldn't escape, but because you believed it.
He's going to... I mean, can you imagine the regret?
The regret? I've sometimes acted too far too fast.
But I have no real regrets.
And I can't imagine the regret that people would feel.
So they're really invested in this stuff.
Or their mom or dad or both did all of this stuff.
Your mom gave up a good man because she believed in this myth of the evil patriarchy.
Now, is she going to say, you know, the great one who could have made me super happy, he got away, he's happily married, he's well off, he's successful, he's a positive, happy person, and I ended up dating this crap-for-brains father of yours who took off within 17 minutes of me finding out I was pregnant.
Is she going to sit there and say, well, you know, I made a terrible mistake, I kind of ruined my life, and you grew up without a father because I was an idiot who believed propaganda.
Or is she going to say, yes, men are patriarchal poison.
She's going to justify. This is the...
This terrifying feeling that you might have made terrible decisions and ruined your life and ruined the life of your children.
It's horrifying.
And so people are very invested in the continuance of this.
So... The idea of equality of outcome, it's endless, it's exhausting, you'll never be able to achieve it.
And it burns you out.
Because, I don't know, like you have this thing in your head.
Well, when everyone is fulfilled, when everyone is happy, when everyone is self-actualized and everything is equal, then I can finally, finally relax, enjoy my life and be happy.
When everyone in the world has enough to eat, when there's no gender pay gap, when there's no disparities between ethnic groups in anything, when everything is perfectly equal forever.
Why then, I can finally relax and enjoy my life.
It will never happen.
You will never ever be able to achieve that.
It will never happen in the world.
So if you need that to have a happy life, you're just condemning yourself.
To a miserable existence.
And then anyone who promotes equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, anyone who promotes that is generating in you this unbelievable, awesome, astonishing anxiety and tension and stress.
I mean, I think, again, no proof time, but just a thought.
I'll plant it and we'll see where it grows.
If you have been a primary caregiver, let's say moms, you've been a primary caregiver to siblings, you're doing the dishes, and there's a thump and a crash in the other room where the brother and sister are playing.
And you go in and they're both pointing at each other saying He started it.
She started it.
It wasn't my fault I was just sitting here and boom he comes up and does this or she comes up and pushes me for no right You can't you can't solve that You can't figure that out.
You weren't there. Unless you're going to GoPro your kids or have an anycam pointed at them 24-7.
You can't figure that one out.
Because if they're kids, most likely, and Peaceful Parenting is different, but most kids, they're going to blame the other kid and you're never going to know.
And your kids, if there's inequality, are going to be miserable.
I mean, this is like, everybody knows this, right?
I mean, this is why, you know, this myth that Trump had two scoops of ice cream.
Who cares? Well, people who've had bad childhoods and unresolved issues.
But yeah, just try this with a kid.
It's real simple.
It's great with siblings, works with friends, works with just about anyone.
Give one scoop of ice cream to one kid, a kid, and give two scoops of ice cream to another kid.
Kaboom! Right?
Or as a friend of mine used to say, his kids would go in for an ice cream.
It's like, okay, I'd like to buy two ice creams, but you're going to need an atomic weigh scale.
I need the exact same number of atoms in each of the ice creams so that the kids won't fight too much.
Yours is more. No, I squished it down.
No, you poked it with the straw. No, mine's melted a bit.
You know, weigh it back and forth, right?
And so, when you're a mom and you've got siblings, equality of outcome Is kind of important.
Because then there is peace.
If there's a strong feeling of unfairness between siblings or whatever, then, right?
So it's almost like, as women have had fewer and fewer kids, or at least white women have had fewer and fewer kids, it's almost like this, well, everything's got to be equal in society.
It's like the instinct that they have for egalitarianism within the family is like being projected onto society as a whole.
Now everything's got to be equal. As if everyone is your children, as if everyone is your sibling, your sibling kids.
It's got to be equal.
And this, I think, is a pretty important way to understand that.
Like in environmentalism, right?
Environmentalism and feminism rose together because women want a clean environment, right?
I mean, women generally, historically, would run the households and having a clean environment was essential, right?
because infant mortality was huge child mortality was huge and so on so you needed a clean environment and so if you can convince women that the whole world is your house then you're going to they're going to be horrified at any environmental negative impacts or whatever and And also relativism.
You know, when people say, well, I can't figure out what the truth is, I can't figure out what right and wrong is, again, I think that's primary caregiver looking at sibling conflict saying, oh, I can't get to the truth, I can't figure anything out, I'm just going to blame both of you and tell you not to do it again, to share, be nice, share, be nice, share, be nice.
So, if you have a mental dedication or an emotional investment in equality of outcome, then anything which you perceive is going to serve a Expansions of inequality in society is going to make you really anxious.
It's going to make you really anxious.
And so here's an example, right?
Let's pretend I'm an ice cream vendor and you, you as a mom, you come up with your three kids, right?
And I say, okay...
The youngest kid gets one scoop, the middle kid gets two scoops, and the oldest kid gets three scoops.
I'm going to charge the same, but this is what happens, right?
Now, as a mom, what would you feel?
You'd be like, oh man, talk about pulling the pin on the grenade.
Whatever you do, don't do that!
That's like the worst thing ever.
That's going to create a conflict that's going to last for the rest of the afternoon.
Because now you're in a situation which you perceive is going to provoke inequality, which is going to provoke massive amounts of conflict.
And this is how people on the left view Donald Trump, that he's going to sit there and say, okay, the rich kids get three scoops of ice cream, the middle class kids get one scoops, and they're lucky if there are any scoops left over for the poor kids or whatever.
There's that emotional reaction that is going to create inequality of outcome because he wants more equality of opportunity.
So it's going to create inequality of outcome, which is going to be really bad and dangerous and scary and negative and create a huge amount of conflict and problems and so on.
Now, this isn't all women.
Like high-quality women, they want equality of opportunity because when they're home raising kids, their husbands are going to be out there winning more meat and sauce in the marketplace, right?
So high-quality women want equality of opportunity, which is why married women, high-quality women, generally prefer Trump to, well, certainly to Bernie Sanders and to Hillary Clinton and so on, Because they want equality of opportunity so that their high-quality husbands can go out and win more cool stuff for the family.
But single moms, low-quality women and so on, they want equality of outcome so they can take the money from the husbands of the high-quality women to subsidize their own lack of a provider often in their households.
So to understand the world, to understand sort of politics and what's going on between left and right.
Like you remember that woman? Woman?
Yeah, I think it was a woman. It took me a while.
They're in some place outside in America and when the inauguration was happening and Trump was announced as the president of the United States, she's like, no!
She's got the glasses on and that weird hat.
No! Why?
Because they perceive that he's going to provoke Equality of opportunity, which is going to provoke inequality of outcome.
And that provokes anxiety and terror in them.
And part of it is that they want stuff transferred to them from the wealthy.
And the other is that they just have this anxiety.
And so anyone who says, even the playing field, let's have more equality of opportunity, provokes anxiety and terror in them.
So Trump is not a person.
He's like an environmental toxin for their own anxiety, for their own cortisol, those stress hormones, their adrenal glands burning out from this constant fight or flight.
So why? Like, trying to control Trump is trying to control their own anxiety because equality of outcome is being challenged and is potentially being displaced to some degree with equality of opportunity.
So why does this woman cry, no, when Trump is inaugurated?
Because now she's going to face years of soul-crushing and terrifying anxiety.
Because she perceives that inequality is going to expand because equality of opportunity is winning.
And she doesn't understand.
I don't think it's because she's not smart enough.
They heard all this economic determinism propaganda.
And they have bad answers to important questions.
And they haven't understood, as I mentioned before, in the free market, when you lose, you win.
If you're not, if you don't get into medical school, because you're not smart enough, you're not good at biology, whatever, right?
If you don't get into medical school, that sucks for you.
You want to go become a doctor, but you're just not good at it.
Or let's say you go into medical school, you don't graduate, you crash out or whatever.
You've won. You've won.
Why? Why? Because if you're not going to be a good doctor and you don't get into medical school, when you get sick, you will get a better doctor.
If the standards are this high, nice and high, and you only measure up halfway or a third, you're out.
Oh, it sucks. I want to become a doctor.
Oh no, I'm sick.
Well, if the standards were lower, you'd get a worse doctor, which might kill you.
You might not survive.
The kind of standards that would allow you to become a doctor would probably kill you, or may kill you.
So, in the free market, when you lose, you win.
Let's say you have some idea for a business that's not that great, or at least people don't perceive it as that great, so you don't get $100,000 in investment.
It goes to some other person.
Maybe that other person has a really great cure for an illness.
It could save your life. The fact that you don't get the investment means that it goes to someone else who can build something cool, who can build something great.
You know, maybe because you don't get the $100,000, somebody else gets the $100,000, which they use as the seed capital to build a jetpack that allows you to go cooler places or get a job in some place you couldn't otherwise get too easily or not have a car and save money, whatever it is, right? I don't know.
But if you don't get the investment, it means it's going to someone else in general over time.
I mean, certainly investors make mistakes, but over time, the investors who make mistakes end up with less money under management.
The investors who predict more correctly which businesses are going to succeed, they end up with more money.
So when you lose in the free market, you win.
You win, and I've constantly said this, like if someone comes along who's better at explaining freedom, better at motivating people to be good and virtuous and thoughtful and so on, I'll go work for them happily, because that will serve philosophy even better than I can.
I'm not holding my breath, but it could happen, right?
I'm thinking about this in terms of migrants, right?
And again, this is something that I think most people could understand.
It's just usually not explained to them very well.
So let's say... There were, what, 200 million people on the move at the moment?
So what does that mean? Well, it means that Europe has less money to invest in goods and services that could really make the lives of third world people better.
One of the things really, really important in the third world is air conditioning, of course, or penicillin, or other things that fight infectious diseases, or inoculations.
Those are good. Now, it's funny to think that if they were developed a generation or two ago, or three sometimes...
So if they'd all gone to, from Sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East or other places in North Africa, if they'd all swarmed into Europe three generations ago, then none of those amazing life-saving technologies and life-enhancing technologies would have been developed because money would have been diverted from the free market into welfare payments to people from the third world, which means that really, really important stuff to keep people in the third world alive isn't developed.
So this is the kind of thing.
If you come and drain...
The taxpayers have resources in the West.
The West doesn't have really any money left over to start developing cool stuff that makes life in the third world much better.
So the first world crashes.
The third world doesn't recover because it can't because the first world isn't developing cool stuff that can help the third world become wealthier.
And everything falls apart.
Again, this is just stuff that people don't understand.
If you fail to get into Europe, your life will probably be a lot better in the long run.
But that takes a lot of conceptual understanding or at least, I guess, a fairly decent explanation of that.
It's sort of like, you know, there are 500 people in the water because a boat sank.
And, you know, there's a lifeboat that says, okay, I'm going to row this lifeboat.
We can take five people. We're going to row and we're going to go get help.
We're going to bring back a nice freighter.
Everyone's going to get out of the water and so on.
And people freak out. And they all try and get on the lifeboat.
And the lifeboat sinks. And then no one can go and get help.
Stay in the water and help will come.
Stay in your country. Anyway.
Now, I really appreciate you listening to this.
I hope that you get how important and illuminating this is.
And if you sort of meditate on this and look at the world through this equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, you'll see it everywhere.
And most people aren't really very conscious of it.
But once you get this into your consciousness, like, I don't know if this knowledge is going to save the world.
I have, like an emotional bias, this hyper-manic, obsessive-compulsive control of everyone to have the same outcomes.
Ah, kind of drives me crazy.
It's people who can't explain to people, well, you won because you lost.
Society won and therefore you will win because you lost.
They can't explain that.
It's like this weird over-empathy, this sort of pathological altruism.
Like the kid who loses the race just crying.
Not coming. But you lost the race!
Maybe it means you're a bad runner.
Maybe it means you're potentially a good runner, but you need to work harder.
Maybe, I don't know. Maybe you don't have the face for the bastard before you big...
I don't know. But it's like, because...
It's a female thing, I guess, right?
But because...
That crying...
I want to make that crying kid feel better.
I want to make that crying kid feel better.
So I'm going to give him a prize.
I'm going to give him a trophy. I'm going to give him a participation trophy or whatever.
You're not helping him or her.
You're not. You're not helping that child.
They need the reality of the feedback.
You cannot eat the participation trophy you don't get because you didn't get the job.
If you don't get the job Nobody says, well, you know, you didn't get the job that pays you $50,000 a year, but here's $5,000 just for coming out to the interview.
There's no participation trophies in life.
You know, when I was in the business world and I was an entrepreneur, I'd write these big requests for proposal responses and so on and try and sell, you know, sometimes we'd win, sometimes we'd lose, but there was never, well, you lost, but here's a trip to Cabo for, you know, you lost.
You lost. I'm sorry.
I mean, women I wanted to date but who wouldn't date me didn't get married but say, you know what, I'll be the side chick from time to time.
Just throw you a little V just because you tried.
It's like, no, it doesn't work. She's monogamous to him and she's never going to sleep with me.
Eh, that's how it should work.
You lost, you lost. Shielding children from reality.
You know, it's great. For toddlers, you know, I said women are fantastic at raising babies and toddlers.
I think you kind of need men to help transition that to full adulthood.
Toddlers, you don't let them learn from consequences, right?
You childproof your home. You know, well, they are playing with a fork near an electrical outlet.
I'll let the voltage teach them, you know, I'll let the fall down the stairs teach them not to play on the stair.
No, you have to protect them from the consequences.
You have to shield them from reality.
Because reality is too catastrophic, too harsh a teacher for babies and toddlers.
But you can't keep...
I mean, the only way that you can prevent people from the negative emotional experience that they get from failure is to pretend that their toddler is forever, which is part of the whole determinism thing and you can't succeed and so on.
So I don't know. Like, I have this sort of emotionally creepy, claustrophobic, pushback response to the claustrophobia I experience from this.
And it's funny too because the leftists...
The people who want equality of outcome, they don't want equality of outcome because of some big giant fairness doctrine, because they're willing to create a vastly unfair state in order to achieve this goal of fairness.
They do it because it makes them anxious when there is an inequality of outcome, either because they overempathize with the people who've lost and can't tell them that it's a good thing they lost, or because they hope to get resources out of this inequality, this equality of outcome, this shifting of resources by the state.
So, I mean, it's either over-empathy or greed that is causing all of this.
And they're also very concerned about exploitation.
But the reason that they want equality of outcome, which is exploitive fundamentally because it gives all this power to the state and control to the state and so on, it's very exploitive.
The reason they rail so much against exploitation is because deep down they know that they're exploiting others, that they want this inequality of They want this equality of outcome because inequality provokes anxiety in them, either because, again, the over-empathy or because they want greed.
They greedily want stuff that the state can give to them.
That's exploitation. So I don't know if this knowledge will save the world or save us.
It's really important to have. I don't know if it's going to save us, but more knowledge about essential items always, always helps.
So thank you so much for listening. Please don't forget, freedominradio.com slash donate.
You know I break it down pretty well.
You know I give you the kind of knowledge that clarifies the world.
Please, please do me the solid of going to freedomainradio.com to help us out.
And let me know what you think, what your experiences are when you contemplate inequalities of outcomes, when you think about whether equality of outcomes can ever be achieved without tyranny.
